Kind One by Laird Hunt Read Free Book Online Page A

had gone back to their bath. My hand was still wet and soapy from where I had slapped Cleome. Linus Lancaster lit a pipe, looked at the girls, and I looked at my hand glistening and felt it burning in the hall.
    None of us looked at Linus Lancaster when he put his spoon into his black-eyed peas and brought it up to his mouth then took a pull out of his bottle and turned and patted my hand and said it to me again. That I was the mother to them. Who would do worse than slap in the coming days. God help us all.

4.

WHEN WE WERE ALL STILL YOUNG in that place in Kentucky, and before the pigs had been set loose and the visits down the hall had commenced and I had become the mother to everyone there, we used to go out to where Alcofibras had his corner in the barn. We would go giggling out into the evening when Linus Lancaster was still at his work, whatever that was, far from the house and not expected back for supper, and we would find Alcofibras, and he would tell us stories that weren’t out of that good book I never had found or out of any book I’ve ever known, and we would listen and sit together and shiver as he told them to us on the straw. Alcofibras had a voice that could churn as deep as a rock hole or high and twisty as a sick redbird, and he had had his stories from a grandmother who had come over in a boat. When he told his stories he never blinked. His eyes just flicked from one of us to the other. When he was finished we went back to whatever it was we had been doing or were supposed to be doing and needed to get done. We didn’t giggle when he had completed his story. We walked quietly. Sometimes Horace or Ulysses had come in with us for the telling. They were each one of them near as big as Linus Lancaster, but there wasn’t any sound to them when they left either.
    When they were young, I used to scrawl out stories to the children of my employer, Mr. Lucious Wilson, who had lost his wife when the second of them came into this world and looked to the ladies in his employ to ease the burden on him and his children’s nurse. When it was my turn I would scrawl out stories I remembered from my burnt books about Rumpelstiltskin, that little man who spun gold and tore himself in half, and about Hansel and Gretel, who got themselves in a fix in that wood. I told them those stories and I told them others, but even though they came to call me Scary I never told them any of what we heard out in that barn from Alcofibras.
    There was one about black bark and one about wet dough. In the one about black bark a man found a piece of black bark in his coat pocket and threw it away, but the next time he put on his coat it was there again. He threw that bark down a well and it was there again. He threw it into the fire and there it was. When he went to hit it with his hammer the piece of black bark opened its eye and looked at the man. Then it closed its eye, and the man lifted it up careful and put it in his pocket and never went anywhere without it again. In the one about wet dough, a woman was fixing to bake a pie. She got out her necessaries and rolled out her dough and put it into her dish. When she had it into her dish she looked at it and commenced to cry. The tears fell on the dough and the dough drank the tears until it could drink no more, and before long the tears had filled the dish. When they had filled the dish, the woman dried her eyes and took off her apron and walked out of the house and left that place forever. When the people who lived in the house with the woman came home, they found the pie dish and a piece of wet dough all curled up inside it like something drowned.
    In another way Alcofibras told it, the woman never got to leave that place. She just cried and cried until everything wet in her had fallen into that dough and the dough drank it all and she just shriveled up and fell into pieces on the floor.
    You hear something like that and it walks out the door with you. It follows you out the door to your